Fantasy Movie League observations from an obsessed nerd

February 3, 2016

Fantasy Movie League Awards Season Week 10 Picks

The string of weird weekends continues as we are greeted this week with Super Bowl Weekend. Or do I have to call it “The Big Game” for risk of being sued by Roger Goodell and the NFL? Just in case, let me be clear that this is not the official Fantasy Movie League prediction column of Super Bowl 50.

The Coen brothers are back this week with “Hail, Caesar!”, the Nicholas Sparks franchise continues with “The Choice”, and the latest entry in movies based on Seth Grahame-Smith novels hits the screens in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. Movie house attendance in general should be down for the weekend with films targeting folks looking to avoid the culmination of professional football season in plentiful supply.

Week 10 Summary Table

Here is the summary table that I use to assess the results of my model (full table):

The PBO and SBD columns come from the ProBoxOffice.com and ShowBuzzDaily forecasts this week, which are then averaged. The Value column divides the Average by the FB$. The Use column applies the average of the Value column to non-forecasted films based on their FB$ and is the full list of what I use in my model. The PPP Showtimes column is data, courtesy the kind folks at Gracenote who let me use their showtimes API, from the Phil’s Phun Plicks Chatter post on showtimes in his metro area.

The big Best Performer (BP) candidate for the week is “Kung Fu Panda 3”, which I’ll expand on below.

Week 10 Perfect Combo Probabilities

For the first time ever, my model suggests leaving multiple screens blank, largely based on the presumption that “Kung Fu Panda 3” will bring in $24.5M. The interesting thing is that just based on the forecasts alone, the top play would be the fourth one listed in the table above, “Kung Fu Panda 3” + 4x “The Finest Hours” + 3x “Daddy’s Home”. But my model accounts for possible variances and in the scenario where “Kung Fu Panda 3” is underestimated by the forecasts, it wins Best Performer in a landslide.

However, if we apply some common sense here, it becomes clear that a 2x “Kung Fu Panda 3” strategy is risky. The first film in the series dropped 44.2% its second weekend and the sequel did worse, dropping 49.9%. The averaged forecasts above predict that this current episode will drop only 40.65%, perhaps due to people who missed it because of weather last week but it would still be unprecedented for the series. Also, look at the floor numbers in the first two rows in the table. Should “Kung Fu Panda 3” not do well it has a much lower floor than some of the other considerations.

I’ll stay true to my word and play the top item in the probabilities table this week on my “model only” account but on my main account I’ll be playing the much less risky fourth row. It hedges between the top two Best Performer candidates and has a much higher floor should things go wrong.